The picks of the issue – or the last three or four months, or what I simply feel like playing over and over – must go to Blackthrone’s Black Metal Juggernaut [Amortout] and Grand Belial’s Key’s Kosherat [Drakkar]. Conveniently enough, both were released as ’05 was drawing to a close, and both would’ve easily made Top 10 contention. Anyway, a lot of (squarer) folk are in a message-board uproar about BT’s unabashedly punk ethic, or whether they’re a joke, or whether they’re whatever, and even some of my Finnish f(r)iends may feasibly hate them. Fuck all that. Simply put, Black Metal Juggernaut is the penultimate synthesis of black-fucking-Finnish-filth and not-entirely-removed Scandinavian D-beat, raging and ragged and rabid and just about perfect. Really, I could go on at length about this, but the parallels between dirty BM and D-beat are so deep, it’s not even funny. The joke’s on you.

Blackthrone is a Finnish Black/Thrash/Punk Metal band which has been active since 2000. Their music sounds like a mix between The Misfits, The Exploited, Motorhead and Darkthrone. Despite of this apparently bizarre mixture the results are pretty good. The music of Blackthrone is pretty more inclined towards the traditional Black Metal sound, but the Thrash/Punk influences are very marked into their music, the most dense and rocking parts sounds, specially in the guitar work, sound very influenced by The Misfits, while the most speedy parts seems to be taken from some The Exploited rehearsal.

metal-archives.com

*Sigh* Why the FUCK do I love this album so much? I mean, it's an album by a band of Finnish numbskulls that exists essentially for the sole purpose of parodying the cliches and shortcomings of black metal. However, Metal Maniacs scribe Nathan T. Birk, whose opinion I completely trust, heaped gobs and gobs of praise on these guys, this album in particular, and I decided that if that son of a bitch likes it then it must be worth checking out. Needless to say, I tracked the thing down from Amortout, and was immediately blown away. Joke band or not, Blackthrone create spirited black/thrashmetalcore, a fusion the likes to which I have personally never bore witness.

I know that the "-core" suffix in my description of the band will scare some people off. Please bear in mind, though, that I say "core" in the sense of Discharge and Anti-Cimex: there are no white, studded belts, black mod cuts, or eyeliner pencils to be found here. There are, however, d-beats gallore, a technique for which I'm a complete sucker, every time. I mean, fuck, this album is *at least* half d-beat, which is perfectly fine by me. Even better is the fact that the band put the (dis-)influence into a metal context, much like Hellbastard did in the late 80s. Elsewhere are riffs that could have been, and probably were, lifted directly from that unholy trinity of Slayer albums produced from '86 to '90 (go listen to "Black Hole Satan," right now, and tell me that's *not* the riff from "South of Heaven"), and moments recalling "Overkill" or "Ace of Spades" in their all-out, unabashed, raucous rocking. There are, of course, a fair amount of black metal stylings to be found herein, and Blackthrone mixes them so seemlessly with their punk/hardcore/thrash influences that the concoction, whether or not you want to admit it, is rendered entirely original. With albums like this, though, I could give a fuck about originality, as it's infectiousness that counts, and this record's got it in spades. The songs are genuinely unforgettable, and I've caught myself humming (!) them for days on end (c.f. "Blitzkrieg to Vatican," "Panzerfisting," "Funeral Death.") Blackthrone, in despite of all of their comedic posturing, know how to write a hook, and a *metal* hook at that, evidenced above all by "Hordes of Werewolves" and the aforementioned "Black Hole Satan."

Nevertheless, I'm not at all comfortable calling this a black metal album, because it's not. Using black metal as their impetus, Blackthrone have created a record of old-fucking-school crossover thrash/crust, peppered but here and there with Blackinavian chords and progressions. I know a lot of black metal purists have criticized these guys to hell and back, but being a "joke band" per se is neither here nor there. "Black Metal Juggernaut" is nothing more than a fun, t(h)rashy jaunt through the bowels of one of the lesser levels of Hell, merely teasing Satan's member instead of allowing complete skull-fuckery. Keep this in mind, dear minions, and have yourselves ripped a new one.